“24” Drones On

“24,” that great ticking television id of our post-September 11th consciousness, is back on Fox, for a twelve-episode, limited-engagement series called “Live Another Day.” (It should probably be called “Live Another Half Day,” but, oh well.) Jack Bauer, our hero (and Antonin Scalia’s), turns up in London, four years after he was forced to go underground following a series of rogue maneuvers that left him an enemy of the American state. Bauer has somehow intercepted intel on a hacker for hire who has—let the man himself tell you:

He’s designed an override device that can take control of as many as ten U.S. drones. That device is now in the hands of a known terrorist. The new drones carry six Hellfire missiles. You have any idea what that can do to a city like London?

Guess who else is in London? The U.S. President, James Heller (William Devane), who is there to negotiate a military-base deal with the British Prime Minister (played, in a funny stroke of casting, by Stephen Fry). This is the most important military-base deal in history, or at least it seems that way, since Heller is staking his Presidency (or something) on getting it done, and doing so despite being in fragile health, or, as his chief of staff (Tate Donovan) keeps putting it, in a “compromised state.” President Heller is the target of the drone-wielding terrorist, and his death “on foreign soil,” we’re told a few times, would lead inexorably to a world war. Sounds plausible. Wait, war between whom exactly? Who cares, there’s no time!

“24” premièred on Fox on November 6, 2001, not quite two months after 9/11. In its first episode, a terrorist blew up a plane. It’s easy now to forget how significant that first season was, both from a technical perspective—with its use of simulated real time and split-screen action—and in the way the show both reflected and provoked a mood of fear and a desire for retribution. (The first batch of baddies were Serbs with a grudge, but Muslim terrorists played key roles in subsequent seasons.) Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer became the fictional pitchman of a certain kind of American rough justice. He was an idol to those who liked to refer to waterboarding as “enhanced interrogation” and, increasingly, a villain to those who called it torture. Bauer routinely used torture to get information, and it was generally shown to be effective. Bauer was also regularly tortured himself, as if to even the odds, though he seemed to bear up better under the pressure than his victims did. Torture wasn’t glorified as pleasant or inconsequential but, rather—as it has often been portrayed on television and in film, before and after 9/11—as grimly necessary. All told, you were likely to see someone cutting, electrocuting, or beating someone else on a schedule of once every two episodes.

The show’s animating spirit during its first six seasons was the co-creator and executive producer Joel Surnow, a rare Republican in Hollywood. In 2007, Jane Mayer profiled him for The New Yorker. He defended the show’s use of torture in practical, personal terms: “They say torture doesn’t work. But I don’t believe that. I don’t think it’s honest to say that if someone you love was being held, and you had five minutes to save them, you wouldn’t do it. Tell me, what would you do? If someone had one of my children, or my wife, I would hope I’d do it. There is nothing—nothing—I wouldn’t do.” The pro-torture message was helped by the way the show always made the choices so stark—good versus evil, mass civilian casualties versus the dirtied hands of one man. Surnow told Mayer that “24” had a lot of fans in the Bush White House. “People in the Administration love the series, too,” he said. “It’s a patriotic show. They should love it.”

Not everyone agreed—and dissent came from at least one unexpected source. Mayer writes that the producers of the show were chastised during a meeting with U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy, at West Point, who said that the show was directly responsible for instilling bad habits in young members of the military, who were among the show’s biggest fans. As Mayer writes, “His students were particularly impressed by a scene in which Bauer barges into a room where a stubborn suspect is being held, shoots him in one leg, and threatens to shoot the other if he doesn’t talk. In less than ten seconds, the suspect reveals that his associates plan to assassinate the Secretary of Defense.”

Surnow left the show before the seventh season, but “24” never quite gave up on its basic premise: pressed for time, torture is the most efficient way to get information. Season 7 began with Bauer defending his ways before a group of skeptical legislators in a congressional committee. But, up against the ditherers in the Senate, how could Jack’s man of action look like anything other than a hero? Don’t they know what this man has done for the country? This new limited-engagement season begins with Jack being captured by the C.I.A., which, upon getting hold of him, yet for no obvious reasons, immediately decides to torture him. Why mess with what works?

Back in the Bush years, “24” seemed to carry water for the Bush government by endorsing the Administration’s sense of the world as a set of binaries, pitting the U.S. against an enemy so unscrupulous that our own scruples must be considered a hindrance to safety. But, even in its most torture-happy seasons, “24” never really endorsed the notion that the government should be trusted. Most of the plots turned on high-level treason; in Season 5, the President was an outright Bond villain. Instead, it portrayed a world even more perilous than Dick Cheney could have imagined in his bunker, a world in which we are so perpetually unsafe—from foreign governments and power-hungry ideologues, and even from our own elected officials—that our only hope is the decisive action of one ruthless and selfless man.

“24” ended its first run during the Obama Administration, but it didn’t seem to respond directly to the country’s new political reality. Still, the show has always kept up with the news. This season, there has been urgent mention of metadata, and, this being London, liberal use of CCTV. Most significant, there are drones. Jack is thrown in with a cell of anti-surveillance hackers, led by a Julian Assange type whom Jack must beg for assistance in preventing an attack. “It wouldn’t be an issue if your country hadn’t decided to fill the skies with unmanned heavy-armed aircraft, would it?” the hacker says. Bauer responds, as is his wont, with stony silence. He never talks politics, and, at this point, his life long ago ruined by his service to the country, he is a warrior for a vague ideal that he describes like this: “You can’t bring back the ones you love. Trust me. But you can honor their lives by helping others. It is the only way forward.”

The very premise, of course, of the American President being offed by his own killer robots is a political argument. The old “24” defended torture because security mattered above all else; the ticking clock was a countdown to catastrophe, and the narrative was about thwarting it. Evil was out there, waiting to do us harm. The new “24” is making a more nuanced argument: now the United States’ vulnerability stems from its very obsession with security. This season’s terrorist ring is led by Margot Al-Harazi, a convert to Islam who is, among other things, surely—we’ll see—out to avenge the death of her husband, who was killed by an American drone. She leads a transnational family—a kind of Benetton version of Muslim extremism, radicalized by America’s military adventurism. In this way, these episodes offer a fitting coda for a show that has tracked the country’s mood from the neocons to Snowden. The drones are coming home to roost. Eight episodes left.

Photograph by Daniel Smith/FOX.

Ian Crouch is a writer and producer for newyorker.com, where he began working in 2009.